Thread

Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage

403 points · 533 comments · sensanaty

yeag123 · 1791176084 · focus · HN ↗
As other commenters have pointed out, 13.3 million gallons = ~40.8 acre-feet and this being Nebraska, the obvious comparison is agriculture (Corn and Soybeans being the main crop).
The average Nebraska farm is 989 acers[1] as of 2022 and uses roughly ~1,200 acre-feet of water (or roughly 390 million gallons) per year[2]. So a single average Nebraska farm uses roughly 30 times the water the Lincoln data center uses per year. There are 44,479 farms/ranches covering 44 million acres, which accounts for over 90% of the state's total land area.
Until I looked this up, I didn't appreciate the scale of water usage in farming (even in a state like Nebraska that gets a large amount of rainfall compared to Central or Southern California). I hope that the current data center environmental focus continues to shed light on our industrial water and electrical usage.
[1]<a href="http://farmflavor.com/nebraska/nebraska-crops-livestock/top-nebraska-agriculture-facts/" rel="nofollow">http://farmflavor.com/nebraska/nebraska-crops-livestock/top-... [2]<a href="https://cropwatch.unl.edu/2024/2023-irrigation-and-water-management-data-now-available/" rel="nofollow">https://cropwatch.unl.edu/2024/2023-irrigation-and-water-man...
1. beAbU · 1791186240 · focus · HN ↗
  TIL about the acre-foot. Sometimes, you Americans are really funny with your units !
  1. reaperducer · 1791192463 · focus · HN ↗
    you Americans are really funny with your units
    Allow me to introduce you to the Dutch "ox head"
    <a href="https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okshoofd" rel="nofollow">https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okshoofd
    I wonder how many British "stones" that is.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(unit)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(unit)
    ssl-3 · 1791194719 · focus · HN ↗
    Stone is a fun one. The singular and the plural are the same, like deer. So 1 stone is correct and 2 stone is also correct.
    For livestock, there was a pre-butcher (14-pound) stone and a post-butcher (8-pound) values for stone.
    A customer brings a lamb in that is very much alive and that weighs, say, 8 stone.
    The blood, hide, and offal is kept by the butcher. After that's subtracted, about 8 stone of meat and bone is expected to be returned to the customer.
    Acre itself is fun, too: That's about how much land one man with one ox can plow in one workday. It was a convenient way to keep farmland in perspective.
    Anyway, an acre-foot of water weighs a little bit shy of 200,000 stone.
    It takes very close to 2 acre-feet of water to fill one olympic-sized swimming pool.

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